Saturday, June 25, 2022
Welcome back readers! This is the fourth post in our Mental Model series. So far we have discussed what do we mean by mental models and two important mental models namely First Principles and Circle of Competence. If you somehow missed out on the previous posts, check them out here, here & here.
Thought Experiments, as the name suggests, means performing experiments in your vivd imagination to help you take better decisions. Thought experiments help us take on events which are difficult to replicate in the real world, but their results are of utmost important. Let us try to understand this with an example -
Imagine I ask you a simple question and then ask you to bet everything you have on your answer. The question is who will win a one-on-one “fair” cricket match between the ex-Indian cricket team captain Virat Kohli and the famous Bollywood actress Anushka Sharma. Chances are you might answer this question immediately without a second thought, and might even bet everything you have on your answer.
Now I change the question but the rules remain the same. You have to bet everything you have. The question is who will win a one-on-one “fair” cricket match between the ex-Indian cricket team captain Virat Kohli and the present Indian captain Rohit Sharma. Tough, no? If you don’t belong to either of the player’s fan club and are not biased, you will probably find it tougher to answer this question compared to the previous one. However, in both these experiments, what process did you follow to come to a definite answer? You probably imagined both the individuals in your mind, ran some experiments, compared their stats and arrived at your answer. You obviously did not invite Virat, Anushka and Rohit for one-on-one match. This is something we do all the time, but don’t realise it often.
A few areas in which thought experiments are tremendously useful -
Imagining physical impossibilities
Re-imagining history
Intuiting the non-intuitive
“If you had all the money in the world, what would you do?”
“If time was not a constraint, what would you do?”
There are many such questions we often have to deal with. Obviously you cannot have all the money in the world and time will always be a constraint. Yet we try to answer these questions by running thought experiments in our brain. Having all the money in the world and all the time in the world leads you to an alternate reality and trying to answer this question with respect to that alternate reality leads us to insights regarding what we value in life and where to focus our energy on.
Another familiar use case of thought experiments is re-imagining history. This is agains something we do all the time!
“What if I had finished that last chapter?”
“What if I had not met her at the airport?”
We need to realise that the events that happened in history are but one realisation of the historical process - one possible outcome among a large variety of possible outcomes. All the things that could have happened but didn’t happen are invisible to us.
As popular and generally useful thought experiments are, they are also the area with which we need to use the most caution. Why? Because history is chaotic. A small change in the beginning conditions can cause a very different outcome down the line.
Steps involved in thought experiments -
Ask a questions
Conduct background research.
Construct Hypothesis
Test with thought experiments
Analyze outcomes and draw conclusions
Compare to hypothesis and adjust accordingly.
I hope you are learning something new every Saturday with these mental model posts, feel free to comment your favourite post so far from the series and any suggestions or examples you can think of where you use thought experiments daily.
See you next Saturday, until then have a great weekend :)
Cheers!
A FEW THINGS KEEPING ME AWAKE
Article: On Children
Video: Pâro: The Feeling That Everything You Do Is Somehow Wrong
Song I am listening to: Tum Jab Paas by Prateek Kuhad
Thought of the week: "Success is the inevitable byproduct of learning (not education)."
MEME OF THE WEEK
SARCASTIC REFLECTION
Here are the last three posts if you were too occupied to read them -